Topics - East Coast Hustle

So I don't usually post in this subforum, because it usually feels like a bit of a violation of the spirit of the thing. But this is too good not to share. This is the best thing.

You'll need one of these:

You'll need some good soy sauce. This is important - Kikkoman is the absolute WORST soy sauce you should ever use, and it's the only soy sauce in the basic supermarket that's even that good. So use Kikkoman if you have to, but don't you dare use some bullshit-ass LaChoy or Yamasa or some shit like that.

You'll need some green onions, sliced very thin on a hard bias.

You'll need some butter (sunflower or canola oil work fine if you're dairy-free but don't use olive oil for this one)

You're gonna need some quail eggs. And since there's a pretty good chance that your best bet to find them in a retail setting is at the Asian supermarket you might as well pick up some good soy sauce while you're here. Tobiko is an optional garnish for this dish if, like me, you have an unhealthy obsession with adding fish eggs to bird eggs. If you're feeling that, pick up the smallest amount of tobiko you can get. And none of the weird colored shit, just regular old tobiko. If you're not already familiar with cooking quail eggs in your cast iron egg pan (and why wouldn't you be?) you might want to pick up an extra package so you've got some test eggs to dial in your optimal heat setting.

Get the pan hot on the stove, somewhere around medium heat but let it sit on there for a bit to really make sure the entire pan is heated through. You don't want the eggs to stick so even if your pan is perfectly seasoned you should hit it with a little blast of pan spray (or soak a bit of crumpled paper towel in oil and rub lightly on the egg indents, if you don't have any pan spray). Have the eggs ready to go right next to you and the pan. Put some butter or oil in the center egg well, enough to fill it most of the way. Wait until the butter or oil is hot then turn off the heat on the burner, the pan will stay hot long enough for our purposes. Quickly crack all the quail eggs into the 6 outer egg wells taking care not to break any of the yolks. take a small spoon and baste the top of each egg with the hot butter or oil in the center well, about a half teaspoon for each egg. Hit each egg with a drop or two of the good soy sauce and 3 slivers of green onion (add a small dollop of tobiko here if you're into that sort of freaky shit) and eat them quickly while the yolks are still gooey. If you are doing this for other people you want to bring your hot pan to the table and have your mise en place set up and ready to go.

It should end up looking a little like this:

Only ours is going to look better because we basted the eggs so the whites are set on top and we sliced our green onions cleanly on a hard bias so we'll get consistent coverage and flavor with three slices per egg instead of just grabbing a handful of crap and flinging it at the dish. Also we might have tarted it up with some tobiko, who knows.

Like I said, this is the best thing. If any of you bother to make it and get it down so that everything comes together right at the point where your eggs are set but the yolks are still gooey you will find yourself agreeing with me. And if you're inviting someone over so you can impress them with your culinary skills and try to seal the deal? This is some seriously sexual shit right here. Don't take it lightly and don't underestimate its power.

Would it not be feasible to fire supplies into the besieged area of Aleppo with short range missiles? Doesn't require risking engagement with Russian aircraft in hostile airspace, doesn't require ground involvement, and can even be done through intermediaries in the name of plausible deniability.

If I read this correctly, this guy has essentially devised a mathematical model for consciousness that seems to completely by accident have also found God, though it doesn't appear as though he sees it that way.

Hoffman: I call it conscious realism: Objective reality is just conscious agents, just points of view. Interestingly, I can take two conscious agents and have them interact, and the mathematical structure of that interaction also satisfies the definition of a conscious agent. This mathematics is telling me something. I can take two minds, and they can generate a new, unified single mind. Hereís a concrete example. We have two hemispheres in our brain. But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses. Before that slicing happened, it seemed there was a single unified consciousness. So itís not implausible that there is a single conscious agent. And yet itís also the case that there are two conscious agents there, and you can see that when theyíre split. I didnít expect that, the mathematics forced me to recognize this. It suggests that I can take separate observers, put them together and create new observers, and keep doing this ad infinitum. Itís conscious agents all the way down.

The whole article is pretty fascinating and seems, upon first superficial glance, to not be complete mumbo-jumbo bullshit. I'm really curious to hear what some of the people here who are educated in relevant fields have to say about this.

So naming a baby girl is a surprisingly difficult thing. Do we pick a name that honors beloved ancestors (my dad, her grandpa)? Do we pick one that honors our respective heritages (Thai by way of Guam, Mainer by way of the Virgin Islands)? Or that has some meaning we like or that just sounds really cool or that fulfills my arbitrary familial alliterative tendency to give everybody a "J" name?

I mean, what the shit. How do people not spend months paralyzed with anxiety over the power and influence that the name they choose is going to have over their child's entire life?

So, this is the part where I crowdsource a bit with a target audience that I consider to be a bit more of a jury of my peers than I'd get with a facebook post.

So I'd love any feedback or suggestions any of you might have, especially any of you who have experienced the agony of having to give your kid a moniker that they're stuck with for life and doubly especially any of you who aren't going to say some dumb shit that isn't funny in a failed attempt to be funny.

Organizers hoping to make recreational marijuana legal in Maine's second-largest city will launch their citywide signature-gathering campaign Monday, the state political director for the Marijuana Policy Project said Friday.

David Boyer said his group will launch its petition effort with a news conference in Lewiston where it intends to collect signatures from voters casting ballots in primary and joint charter commission elections Tuesday.

The petition would seek to make possession of up to 2Ĺ ounces of marijuana legal for recreational use under the city's ordinances.

Jared Buzzell, of Lisbon, says he was searching for wild mushrooms Thursday when he saw a porcupine get hit by a car in Minot. Buzzell says he'd heard that a valuable mineral deposit used in Chinese medicine formed in the stomachs of porcupines.

He then cut open the dead porcupine to search for the mineral and instead found the baby.

He tells WMTW-TV (bit.ly/1hlWRUl) he cut the umbilical cord and thought the baby porcupine was dead until he started massaging it and it began breathing.